Amber Portwood, Teen Mom star, sentenced to prison. Are you sad?

Amber Portwood, Teen Mom star, is sentenced to prison on a felony drug charge. Octomom Nadya Suleman is considering stripping for money. Rather than horrified glee when it comes to public mommy train wrecks, perhaps we should find some sympathy. And yes, even sadness.

|
AP
Amber Portwood, the Teen Mom star, was sentenced to prison on a drug charge. drug Troubled moms, elevated to celebrity – like Octomom Nadya Suleman (pictured here in May 2012) who is considering stripping for money – have become parodies of our greatest social problems.

Ok, so am I the only one here who thinks the rapt media attention this week on some of pop culture’s most troubled moms is....  well.... sad?

I don’t mean sad as in “pathetic,” although one could certainly make that argument, too. I’m thinking “sad” here as in heartaching. 

I'm not trying to be preachy. But really, let’s take a look at some of the news that’s come out this week about Teen Mom reality star Amber Portwood and “Octomom” Nadya Suleman – moms who pretty clearly fit that “troubled” category.

Yesterday, a judge ordered that Ms. Portwood, who starred in the MTV reality television shows “Teen Mom” and “16 and Pregnant," serve a five year sentence for a felony drug charge. (Her sentence had been suspended on condition of finishing drug rehab, but she dropped out of the program.) Prosecutors say the now 22-year-old mother was arrested on May 24 after she failed and lied about a urine test.

Meanwhile, Octomom is publicly wavering about her new solution to strip to earn more money for those 14 children.  Celebrity news reports say Ms. Suleman had booked a gig at a Florida strip joint (where she would only have to take off her top, she insisted), but that she backed out after she felt the club owners weren’t showing her enough respect. This comes after she filmed her own porn movie (due to be released this summer), which she called the “most liberating thing I’ve ever done.”

The Internet world and celebrity media are loving every second of these mama train wrecks, with posts, news tidbits, comments, you name it.

And it all kinda makes me want to cry.

Because, you know, both of these women have kids. They may have turned themselves into caricatures (or maybe we turned them into caricatures for our own enjoyment and ridicule), but they’re still people. And mothers. I mean, Portwood has a three-year-old daughter, whom she will for the next couple of years see primarily in a detention center waiting room. And Octomom said she got into the commercial sex industry – however positively she spins it for the media – because she was broke.

“If it’s a job, and it’s a well-paying job, and it’s going to allow me to get out of here and move in a safe, huge home that they [her kids] deserve, I’m going to do it,” she said.

So, we have moms with drug problems. Incarcerated parents. Impoverished women selling their bodies for money. 

It should be sad. Even more so because these are real, important, and troubling social issues that impact scores of women across the country, albeit not often in the spotlight of television cameras.

Maybe you'd think we’d use these gruesomely public examples to delve into a debate about solutions for the underlying social problems. Or maybe we could just take a look at our own lives, say a blessing for how fortunate we are, and resolve to think more of – maybe even try to help – the less fortunate. 

But no. We watch instead with horrified, judgmental glee. 

Maybe this is because public moms like Portwood and Suleman are outlets for all our privileged mommy angst; a release after worrying about which car seat is the best for baby, or whether we’re doing well by Junior to put him in soccer practice rather than extra art class.

It’s like the snarky media coverage of New Jersey’s Tanning Mom, Patricia Krentcil, accused of endangering her daughter by taking her into a tanning salon. (Coverage that is still as glibly nasty today, with new photos of Younger Tanning Mom, once an aspiring model, making their rounds online.)  We love to bring a Bad Mommy – usually one lower down the socio-economic ladder, always caught in the media glare – to a public hanging.

It shows that the rest of us might be struggling moms, but we’re not Bad.  Not like Tanning Mom. Or Octomom. Or Teen Mom. 

No, we’re Good Mommies, at least in comparison.

And because we feel self satisfied, the social problems underneath those Bad Moms’ struggles can continue.  

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Amber Portwood, Teen Mom star, sentenced to prison. Are you sad?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2012/0606/Amber-Portwood-Teen-Mom-star-sentenced-to-prison.-Are-you-sad
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe